Brave

To stand up for animals you have to be vegan, and to be vegan you have to be brave. Not grim, bitter or angry, just quietly brave. No tickets on yourself, no sense of being better than anyone else, just calmly brave, but it’s not for the faint hearted.
Often vegans have to say “no”. No to animal slavery, no I won’t go with you to the zoo, no to a simple ice cream on a hot day. To us it’s plain straightforward why we say no, to others it’s not wanting to join in, a stand offishness. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot socially, and soon enough we get a reputation. We get invited round to dinner and knowing the problems it will cause we say “No”.
People don’t always mean what they say, when they say they admire what we stand for. “Well done”, “I wish I could do it myself”, but beneath the praise an alarm bell rings – “Avoid this one, he/she’s a tree-hugger (or whatever name they give us) … after a while the dinner invitations dry up. Why would anyone want a vegan to come round for dinner, the problems of cooking special dishes but worse, the danger of them embarrassing everyone else by trying to discuss the principles behind a plant-based diet.
So yes, brave. But it isn’t masochism. That’s the point here, why we say “no’ when we’d like to say “yes”, knowing that if we agree to go along with the carnivores it will confirm that they are right and we are ornory. You can’t put a positive spin on that.
By standing up for animals we must go it alone, we can’t expect cows and chickens to encourage us. It must all come from within ourselves. We have to be able to withstand people’s lack of sympathy but also the market’s lack of suitable replacement products. Food and clothing depend so heavily on the animal industries that alternatives often don’t exist. So vegans have to search for their products and often have to pay more for them because there is such a small market demand for them,
On top of all this, vegans need to support the efforts of other vegans who are trying to raise public awareness. And that’s a problem. The pressures of society are so great that just to be vegan is hard enough without other vegans needing support. Those who have got on top of their diets and clothing, who have learnt ways to withstand the heavy pressure from society to conform have usually begun to persuade and encourage the non-vegans to consider making the break with conventional habits, but they themselves need help. The sort of help that can only come from fellow vegans.
This is why veganism has got to embrace a few disciplines and values that will get things moving. There is little discussion here in Australia about moving away from animal use. Animal activism is generally concentrated on the worst abuses of animals on factory farms and in vivisection laboratories. It doesn’t address the wider problem of fundamental attitude change. And yet if this were established, if it became the fashion to boycott anything coming out of the animal industries, we’d see everything else follow; with veganism established the markets would accommodate the demand, the abattoirs would close and the animals farms would go bust, the animal labs would be defunded and the zoos would be shut down. But at present we have a very piecemeal approach to the problems. There are still too few people willing to rally to the call for a thorough uprooting of animal exploitation. And so everything is weakened because of this.